Top 300 Anne Sexton Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives.”

— Anne Sexton

152. “Daisies in water are the longest lasting flower you can give to someone. Fact. Buy daisies. Not roses.”

— Anne Sexton

153. “To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.”

— Anne Sexton

154. “After a disaster strikes, it can be very devastating and very challenging. You’re going to need a lot of strength and energy, and the American Red Cross suggests you go for the high protein items.”

— Anne Sexton

155. “The day of fire is coming, the thrush will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket...”

— Anne Sexton

156. “Maybe, although my heart is a kitten of butter, I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.”

— Anne Sexton

157. “I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.”

— Anne Sexton

158. “It’s all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.”

— Anne Sexton

159. “I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.”

— Anne Sexton

160. “There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning...”

— Anne Sexton

161. “That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry – poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow.”

— Anne Sexton

162. “The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that’s saying a lot.”

— Anne Sexton

163. “The rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.”

— Anne Sexton

164. “Some women marry houses. It’s another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.”

— Anne Sexton

165. “I seem to be a ship that is sailing out of my own life.”

— Anne Sexton

166. “We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!”

— Anne Sexton

167. “When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.”

— Anne Sexton

168. “The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.”

— Anne Sexton

169. “Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind.”

— Anne Sexton

170. “I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.”

— Anne Sexton

171. “The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.”

— Anne Sexton

172. “Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.”

— Anne Sexton

173. “Let me hold your heart like a flower lest it bloom and collapse.”

— Anne Sexton

174. “When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.”

— Anne Sexton

175. “The body is a damn hard thing to kill.”

— Anne Sexton

176. “Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.”

— Anne Sexton

177. “Loving me with my shoes off means loving my long brown legs, sweet dears, as good as spoons; and my feet, those two children let out to play naked.”

— Anne Sexton

178. “I’ve grown tired of love You are the trouble with me I watch you walk right by.”

— Anne Sexton

179. “Evil is maybe lying to God. Or better, lying to love.”

— Anne Sexton

180. “True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.”

— Anne Sexton

181. “Yes, I know. Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted. Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.”

— Anne Sexton

182. “Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.”

— Anne Sexton

183. “I am younger each year at the first snow.”

— Anne Sexton

184. “I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost connections...”

— Anne Sexton

185. “What’s missing is the eyeballs in each of us, but it doesn’t matter because you’ve got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.”

— Anne Sexton

186. “For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.”

— Anne Sexton

187. “Once upon a time we were all born, popped out like jelly rolls forgetting our fishdom, the pleasuring seas, the country of comfort, spanked into the oxygens of death...”

— Anne Sexton

188. “Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.”

— Anne Sexton

189. “I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.”

— Anne Sexton

190. “Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry and He said, Oh Lord, send down a short-order cook.”

— Anne Sexton

191. “Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!”

— Anne Sexton

192. “And so she danced until she was dead, a subterranean figure, her tongue flicking in and out like a gas jet.”

— Anne Sexton

193. “Despite my asbestos gloves, the cough is filling me with black, and a red powder seeps through my veins...”

— Anne Sexton

194. “The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.”

— Anne Sexton

195. “Let the light be called Day so that men may grow corn or take busses.”

— Anne Sexton

196. “As a writer one has to take the chance on being a fool.”

— Anne Sexton

197. “All considerations for these human remains! They must have an escort! They are classified!”

— Anne Sexton

198. “The snow has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.”

— Anne Sexton

199. “The sanest thing in this world is love.”

— Anne Sexton

200. “Even without wars, life is dangerous.”

— Anne Sexton